applied to the nation. The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that,
or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid
insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra
with the brasses predominant.

There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than
of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of
material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force.
Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival
leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should
succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism
which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as
sidelights.

When I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make
a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five who was
helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey,
lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been
allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same
sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to
make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the
front.

Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was righting to
hold what he had and on his own soil. The German had been fighting
on the enemy's soil to gain more land. He, too, thought of it as the
defensive. All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive. But it
was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive. That
was it--that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every
conversation and every act.